Published 7:00 pm, Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Shelters opened, emergency personnel readied and the community braced, but Tropical Storm Edouard’s path through northeast Houston proved nothing more than a tame rain storm.

As expectations built throughout Aug. 5 for Edouard’s path to head through the Atascocita area following the tropical storm’s landfall east of Galveston earlier in the morning, the storm’s strength fizzled.

By late afternoon, Rod Bryant, emergency management coordinator for the Atascocita Volunteer Fire Department, confirmed that the storm was uneventful.

“We had no major flood, no tornadoes, only some minor power outages,” he said. “In fact, we only had one call for services the whole duration of the storm.”

Bryant, though, said the storm’s original hype allowed his department to go through a dry run in case there was a more powerful bout of weather.

“It did give us the opportunity to try out our resources, pull out all our equipment and practice,” he said. “It was very uneventful, which is good. But don’t let those small storms let you become complacent. If we would have had a real hurricane it would not have been this easy.”

Carole Chambers, assistant emergency management coordinator for the city of Humble, said that the state’s Emergency Operations Center had shut down by noon Harris County Transtar was deactivated by 4 p.m.

“We had no major flooding,” Chambers said. “We might get some more rain throughout the evening hours but at this time there are no more watches or warnings.”

Chambers said that by late in the afternoon, there were still around 30 people in the Red Cross shelter that has been set up at First United Methodist Church in Humble but most of them would be moving out by the end of the day.

At Bush Intercontinental Airport, delays from Edouard slowed down travellers.

“Right now we have 30 minute to five hour delays depending on where you are going and what carri er you are flying,” Marlene Mc Clinton, public information officer for the Houston Airport System, said at about 11 a.m.

McClinton also said staffing had been beefed up to handle pas sengers in terminals and any problems that may have arisen on the ground.

“We have extra staff on board to make things as painless as possible in the terminals,” she said.

McClinton said with five runways at IAH, as soon as the weather pass es flights will be up and running as quickly as possible.

“It would have to be a catastrophe to shut down,” she said.

By mid afternoon in Kingwood, the weather had produced minimal damage.

Several large tree limbs covered driveways and yards after gusts of winds blew through Kingwood but none of them caused any bodily harm and damage to homes.

A large branch nearly missed Lloyd and Lois Meredith’s Kingwood home during the worst part of Edouard.

“We were inside the house and all of sudden looked outside and there was a large branch covering our driveway. We never heard anything but it is a rather large branch. We are glad it did not hit our house or cause any damage,” Lois said.

Towards the front of Kingwood, Kingwood Drive suffered flooding in several parts as well as parts of Northpark Drive. Besides a few of the side streets and streets where the gutters may have been clogged, the ditches and small streams were full of water and flowing rapidly.